[not_kurt_godel]

> Spotify has historically opted to run our core infrastructure on our own private fleet of physical servers (aka machines) rather than leveraging a public cloud

One has to wonder why they would opt for this. The entire story is a textbook example of where using a cloud would have been immensely better. Instead of leveraging mature pubic cloud offerings, they chose a path that evidently required huge amounts of developer time and resulted in a tremendous amount of pain/wasted time for downstream developers, only to scrap it in the end when they finally realized there's no point in trying to re-implement AWS/GCE. Think clouds are expensive? I'd love to quantify the number of wasted developer-hours resulting from this decision to use physical servers and see how it would stack up against even a very expensive AWS bill.

[jba]

Depending on their workloads, running their own datacenter(s) might save them millions a month. I know it does in my own case. That said you give up flexibility for the $ savings. They may think the additional flexibility is worth the cost differential at this point.

Would be good to hear their perspective on this.

[negz]

I believe we expect moving to the cloud to be more expensive than running our own DCs as you suggest, but I don't believe that takes into account any 'wasted developer time' you might factor into this.

I believe we started building this platform when AWS was very new, and hadn't seen a compelling reason to transition from it to the cloud until now. There's a couple of posts with more details behind our decision to go to GCP, but primarily it was to leverage their data tooling.

[scurvy]

Network costs. Bandwidth costs is where the cloud stops making sense. Even Netflix hypes up their cloud use, but they don't serve videos from there.